Omnivore, the free, open source read later app
Oct 12, 2023
I’ve been using Wallabag as a self-hosted read later service for a while. Like a free, open source Pocket/Instapaper. It works well enough, but the general UX is a little rough around the edges and development doesn’t seem super speedy - the Android app hasn’t seen a release in a couple of years. I recently stumbled upon Omnivore and it’s already won me over.
The good
- The look and feel is generally very pleasing - it has a similar feel to Pocket
- You can use all the functionality on the hosted instance at omnivore.app for free
- You can customise your reading experience, from the font face right down to the margin size
- There’s a beta RSS reader. I already use FreshRSS so this isn’t super valuable to me personally - I’m happy to manually “promote” content from RSS to read later - but if you’re only working with a few feeds with high quality content, I can see this being handy
- Email inboxes. You can setup email addresses to register with newsletters and have them come straight through to Omnivore. You can also send PDFs and highlight/annotate as with articles
- Regular updates. The Android app was updated last week
- Offline reading in the apps
- Highlights export through well-maintained plugins (Obsidian & Logseq) straight into your notes. Wallabag highlights/annotations use XPath notation, which I’ve found difficult to write markdown export scripts maintaining full formatting from the original article
- It’s self-hostable…ish ⬇️
The less good
- I gave up on self-hosting
- Hosting under a domain name didn’t “just work” - even after setting all the URLs in the
docker-composefile, I was still directed to alocalhostURL - I did a find and replace to change all
localhostreferences to my instance’s URL but wasn’t able to add content - The team are actively working on making it “more self-hostable” so I’ll try again some time!
- Hosting under a domain name didn’t “just work” - even after setting all the URLs in the
I’m finding it very enjoyable to use and I think I’m a convert! As I’m not currently self-hosting there is every chance the hosted service may go away or my data get lost, but I’ll keep exporting my highlights and spin up my own instance once they’ve ironed some of the kinks out!